Can Losing Weight Reduce Stress

Stress awareness and management is a huge topic today. Everything from corporate wellness to stress and sleep aids are creating a booming market for this area. This is especially relevant for people wondering if perhaps they are too stressed to lose weight.

Despite all of our awareness and foresight on how stress impacts our lives and our health, it is still a growing area of concern.

With the economy today, many people not only have full-time jobs, they also have side hustles such as Uber driving and Etsy shops.

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Luckily, the emergence ofSelf Carehas helped many people to stop and focus on maximizing the time they do have by taking care of some of their own needs.

Self care also stems into setting up goals and boundaries in your life and at work so that you can limit the directions you are pulled in and how thin you are stretched in order to really focus on what is important.

(This post goes into deep detail about the types of self care, how to implement them and why they are important: Self Care: Practices to Reduce Stress, Accomplish Goals, and Benefit the Mind & Body)

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While being overweight is of course not something people should judge each other or themselves on and “fat shaming” isn’t cool, as a health professional, I will not ever agree to say that overweight and obesity are not a health concern.

But we all know that! And despite the body positivity movement, we do know that being overweight and obese is not the ideal status for our bodies.

Abdominal adiposity is thought to be primarily visceral, metabolically active fat surrounding the organs, and is associated with metabolic dysregulation, predisposing individuals to cardiovascular disease and related conditions

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There are many ways that we experience stress. Mentally, we see these as necessary and separate things. Aspects of our lives like:

However, our bodies do NOT see these things as separate and necessary. Our bodies interpret all of these things as STRESS. Anything that activates the Fight or Flight response (ie. an acute stress response) is perceived and dealt with by the body in a very real physiological way.

In fact, some anxiety attacks are simply becoming completely frozen and unable to respond or react. Check outAnxiety Canadafor more on this.

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I will keep this brief, but for those of you, like me, who enjoy learning the science behind these types of things, there are, of course hormones that come into play when stress is detected by the body.

Your heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure can all increase. You may feel tense and agitated. Some people walk around like this all the time (you know the ones!)

While cortisol has some beneficial effects, it also can cause a lot of damage if left unchecked. If our sympathetic nervous system is constantly stimulated and cortisol builds up, it can cause weight gain (along with lowered immune functioning, memory and learning impairment, loss of bone density, high cholesterol, heart disease and more).

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Like I already mentioned, there are SO many things in our lives that cause stress, even if they are rewarding and healthy things.

In fact, too much of a good thing, such as with dieting and exercise, can be a main contributor to stress overload which results in you becoming too stressed to lose weight.

Too much exercise, combined with a restricted diet (by calories or by specific macros), can do the very opposite of what you intend.

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Your body can become adapted in ways that are not beneficial to weight loss or health and can cause you to hold on to or even gain belly fat.

Especially if you are combining a low carb or keto diet with exercise, you can end up doing some real metabolic and hormonal damage to yourself.

If you are looking for info on how to get off keto, check out this post on How to Transition Off Keto —Without the Nasty Side Effects

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Dieting is extremely unadvised while pregnant or breastfeeding as you will need a highly nutrient dense diet to support yourself and your little one during this time of life.

Problems with your partner, parents, siblings, in-laws, etc. can really tear down our stress resilience when piled on top of everything else.

In fact, if you live in a highly stressful home life situation, this alone could be enough to cause a lot of damage physically due to stress.

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Similarly, if you have any kind of mental health issues like anxiety and rumination, depression or other issues, these can definitely contribute to or even be caused by increased stress hormones.

Now that you’ve been able to hopefully identify some areas of your life where stress is lurking, you can find ways to hopefully lessen the impact.

If they are non-existent, then you should add physical activity to your day and nourishing foods that help your body properly function.

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Don’t underestimate the cathartic effects of a good sweat session though! High intensity exercise can releasestresshormones in amounts that are beneficial to your body and health without causing damage.

The typical path people go on when beginning a weight loss program is to eat less and exercise more. This combination can wreak havoc on your hormones, especially for women.

Even worse is when that diet is low carbohydrate and you are training hard or a person who really functions best with moderate to high carbs.

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Please evaluate how YOU feel, not just the latest trends and what you have been told or what you think is best.

And remember that men often tolerate things like fasting and low carbohydrate diets much better than women do. It may be a bad idea for you.

For tips on how to incorporate healthy, balanced changes to your diet that can create a huge lasting impact on your health and body composition see this article on Cleaning Up Your Diet.

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Similarly to making sure you do not eat too little and exercise too much, you must remember in general to take time to recover, rest, and refuel.

Everything that you learn and do in your day is processed when you sleep and rest. Recovery from exercise or from learning and doing all happens during the rest and recovery phase.

Self care and healthysleep habits will be paramount to reducing stress in your life. High stresscontributes to insomniaand sleep disruption so it can feel like a no-way-out situation.

Stress And Weight Loss

You are stressed, so you don’t sleep well, the lack of sleep causes intolerance to stress. This is why managing stress in the otherareas of your lifeis so important.

I recommend communication with all things. Always talk about what’s bothering you in your relationships. Real intimacy can only occur when you are open and honest with each other.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much my stress was reduced when I started practicing this. Deciding I deserved to have boundaries and have my needs known saved my relationship and my sanity.

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If your partner is unwilling to do this work with you, I think a re-evaluation of how healthy the relationship is to stay in should be done. As always, I recommend speaking to a mental health specialist if you need help.

This post used weight loss as a way to draw in readers hoping to be healthier and wondering if stress was the reason they were having trouble reaching their goals.

However, I want to point out that my main goal here is to reveal the many ways that stress creeps in and takes over our lives.

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It doesn’t just effect our weight, but our enjoyment of life and our health in the long and short term. Our physical and mental health is greatly affected by the amount of stress burden we carry day in a day out.

I hope this article can go some way to helping you figure out areas you can work on to reduce this burden and get on with living a healthy life!

Hey there, I’m Rachel, people call me Rach. I'm a personal trainer who loves to EAT and LIFT things. I hope you’ll join me in finding out the ways in which we can LIFT EACH OTHER UP and become more real with ourselves about how we want to live and spend our days.

Katie Vaughn Nutrition

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